Tech

New Edith Cowan University (ECU) research has found 94 per cent of Australians caring for a loved one with dementia are sleep deprived.

This can potentially lead to poor health of the carer and may also impact on their ability to provide care for the person living with dementia.

Poor sleep is associated with negative physical and psychological outcomes including hypertension, obesity, mood disorders and dementia.

The study, led by Dr Aisling Smyth from ECU's School of Nursing and Midwifery in conjunction with Alzheimer's WA, investigated the sleep characteristics and disturbances of 104 Australian caregivers of a person living with dementia. In addition, it assessed the psychological wellbeing of caregivers by evaluating associations between mood and sleep.

Dr Smyth said a disrupted sleep pattern is recognised as a significant factor in predicting stress on carers and perhaps more importantly, in predicting placing a loved one into long term care.

"Enabling people living with dementia to stay at home, rather than transfer to long term care is the optimal outcome for many families, but this can't be at the detriment of the caregiver's own wellbeing.

"Therefore, to support the person living with dementia to remain at home, preserving sleep and maintaining caregiver health is vital," Dr Smyth said.

Key findings:

- 94 per cent of participants were poor sleepers, with 84 per cent having difficulty initiating sleep and 72 per cent reporting difficulty maintaining sleep.

- Stress was the most significant predictor of overall sleep quality.

- 44 per cent of participants have two or more chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis and diabetes.

- Psychological distress was common among participants with high levels of moderate to severe depression, anxiety and stress.

Alzheimer's WA Head of Dementia Practice Jason Burton said:

"We hear from many family members about the effect the caring role can have on their quality of sleep, and the negative impacts this can have.

"We have partnered with ECU in this research to learn more about this impact and to find ways to support carers to maintain their health and quality of life."

Sleeping better

Dr Smyth is now working on a program to promote better sleep for dementia caregivers at ECU Psychological Services.

"The aim will be to help them get to sleep quicker and have more efficient and effective sleep. We will also measure whether better sleep improves their ability to provide care," Dr Smyth said.

"If there's a shorter window that they can sleep in, we're aiming to optimise it so it's really good."

The program will use cognitive behavioural therapy designed to help carers manage their stress and equip them with the knowledge and skills to improve their sleep.

Physical Review X recently reported on a new optical resonator from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology that is unprecedented in resonance enhancement. Developed by graduate student Jacob Kher-Alden under the supervision of Professor Tal Carmon, the Technion-born resonator has record-breaking capabilities in resonance enhancement.

A resonator is a device that traps waves and enhances or echoes them by reflecting them from wall to wall in a process called resonant enhancement. Today, there are complex and sophisticated resonators of various kinds throughout the world, as well as simple resonators familiar to all of us. Examples of this include the resonator box of a guitar, which enhances the sound produced by the strings, or the body of a flute, which enhances the sound created in the mouthpiece of the instrument.

The guitar and flute are acoustic resonators in which the sound reverberates between the walls of the resonator. In physics, there are also optical resonators, such as in laser devices. A resonator is, in fact, one of the most important devices in optics: "It's the transistor of optics," said Prof. Carmon.

Generally speaking, resonators need at least two mirrors to multiply reflected light (just like at the hairdressing salon). But they can also hold more than two mirrors. For example, three mirrors can be used to reflect the light in a triangular shape, four in a square, and so on. It is also possible to arrange a lot of mirrors in an almost circular shape so that the light circulates. The more mirrors in the ring, the closer the structure becomes that of a perfect circle.

But this is not the end of the story, as the ring restricts the movement of light to a single plane. The solution is a spherical structure, which allows light to rotate on all planes passing through the center of the circle, regardless of their tilt. In other words, in three-dimensional space.

In the movement from physics to engineering, the question arises of how to produce a resonator as close as possible to a sphere that is clean, smooth, and gives the maximal number of rotations for optimal resonance. It is a challenge that has engaged many research groups and has yielded, among others, a tiny glass resonator in the shape of either a sphere or ring, which is held next to a narrow optical fiber. An example of this was presented by Prof. Carmon two years ago in Nature.

Here, there was still room for improvement, as even the stem that is holding the sphere creates a distortion in its spherical shape. Hence, the desire was born to produce a floating resonator - a resonator not held by any material object.

The world's first micro-resonator was demonstrated in the 1970s by Arthur Ashkin, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics, who presented a floating resonator. Despite the achievement, the research direction was soon abandoned. Now, inspired by Ashkin's pioneering work, the new floating resonator exhibits a resonant enhancement by 10,000,000 circulations of light, compared to about 300 circulations in Ashkin's resonator.

The Levitating Resonator

In a resonator made of mirror that reflect 99.9999% of light, the light will rotate about a million revolutions or "round trips." According to Prof. Carmon, "If we take light that has a power of one watt, similar to the light of the flash on a cell phone, and we allow it to rotate back and forth between these mirrors, the light power will be amplified to about a million watts - the power is equal to the electricity consumption of a large neighborhood in Haifa, Israel. We can use the high light output, for example, to stimulate various light-matter interactions at the region between the mirrors."

In fact, a million watts are made up of the same single particle of light that travels back and forth through matter, but the matter does not "know" that it is the same particle of light that moves repeatedly through the matter, since photons are indistinguishable. It only "feels" the great power. In a device of this type it is also important that the million watts pass through a small cross-sectional area. Indeed, the device developed by Kher-Alden conducts light in 10 million circular trips, in which the light is focused on a beam area 10,000 times smaller than the cross-sectional area of a hair. In doing this, Kher-Alden has achieved a world record in the resonant enhancement of light.

The resonator developed by Technion researchers is made of a tiny drop of highly-transparent oil of about 20 microns in diameter - a quarter of the thickness of a strand of hair. Using a technique called 'optical forceps,' the drop is held in the air using light. This technique is used to hold the drop in the air without material support - which may damage its spherical shape or soil the drop. According to Prof. Carmon, "This ingenious optical invention, the optical forceps, is used a lot in life sciences, chemistry, micro-flow devices and more, and it is precisely the optical researchers who hardly use it - a bit like the cobbler walking barefoot. In the present study, we show that optical forceps have enormous potential in the field of optical engineering. It is possible, for example, to build an optical circuit using multiple optical forceps that hold many resonators and control the position of the resonators and their shape as needed."

The tiny dimensions of the drop also improve spherical integrity, because gravity hardly distorts it, since it is marginal in these dimensions relative to the surface-tension forces at the liquid interface which give it a spherical shape. In the unique system developed by Technion researchers, the drop of oil is held by a laser beam and receives the light from another fiber, which also receives the light back after it has passed through the resonator.

Based on the properties of the light returning to the fiber, researchers can know what happened inside the drop. For example, they can turn off the light entering the resonator and examine how long a photon will survive in the resonator before it fades. Based on this data and the speed of light, they can calculate the number of rotations the photon makes (on average) in a drop. The results show a world record in light amplification: 10,000,000 rotations that pass through a cross-sectional area of about a micron squared, increasing the light 10 million times.

COVID-19 has turned 2020 into a nightmare for many people, as they struggle with health problems, economic uncertainty and other challenges. Now a team of researchers in Finland has evidence that the pandemic really is a bad dream. In a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, scientists used artificial intelligence to help analyze the dream content of close to a thousand people and found that the novel coronavirus had infected more than half of the distressed dreams reported.

The researchers crowdsourced sleep and stress data from more than 4,000 people during the sixth week of the COVID-19 lockdown in Finland. About 800 respondents also contributed information about their dreams during that time - many of which revealed a shared anxiety about the pandemic.

"We were thrilled to observe repeating dream content associations across individuals that reflected the apocalyptic ambience of COVID-19 lockdown," said lead author Dr Anu-Katriina Pesonen, head of the Sleep & Mind Research Group at the University of Helsinki. "The results allowed us to speculate that dreaming in extreme circumstances reveal shared visual imagery and memory traces, and in this way, dreams can indicate some form of shared mindscape across individuals."

"The idea of a shared imagery reflected in dreams is intriguing," she added.

Pesonen and her team transcribed the content of the dreams from Finnish into English word lists and fed the data into an AI algorithm, which scanned for frequently appearing word associations. The computer built what the researchers called dream clusters from the "smaller dream particles" rather than entire dreams.

Eventually, 33 dream clusters or themes emerged. Twenty of the dream clusters were classified as bad dreams, and 55 percent of those had pandemic-specific content. Themes such as failures in social distancing, coronavirus contagion, personal protective equipment, dystopia and apocalypse were rated as pandemic specific.

For example, word pairs in a dream cluster labeled "Disregard of Distancing" included mistake-hug, hug-handshake, handshake-restriction, handshake-distancing, distancing-disregard, distancing-crowd, crowd-restriction and crowd-party.

"The computational linguistics-based, AI-assisted analytics that we used is really a novel approach in dream research," Pesonen said. "We hope to see more AI-assisted dream research in future. We hope that our study opened the development towards that direction."

The study also offered some insights into the sleep patterns and stress levels of people during the pandemic lockdown. For instance, more than half of respondents reported sleeping more than before the period of self-quarantine, though 10 percent had a harder time falling asleep and more than a quarter reported more frequent nightmares.

Not surprisingly, more than half of study participants reported increases in stress levels, which were more closely linked to patterns like fitful sleep and bad dreams. Those most stressed-out also had more pandemic-specific dreams.
The research could provide valuable insights for medical experts who are already assessing the toll the coronavirus is having on mental health. Sleep is a central factor in all mental health issues, according to Pesonen.

"Repeated, intense nightmares may refer to post-traumatic stress," she explained. "The content of dreams is not entirely random, but can be an important key to understanding what is the essence in the experience of stress, trauma and anxiety."

Foreign interference in U.S. elections likely focuses, in part, on creating distrust among Americans, with paralyzing the American political process as its main goal, according to a new RAND Corporation report.

Recent efforts by Russia to meddle in U.S. elections are based largely on strategies developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and partly aim to elicit strong reactions and drive people to extreme positions to lower the odds they will reach a consensus -- a bedrock of American democracy.

New technologies such as the rise of social media have made Russia's information efforts easier to implement than the propaganda campaigns of the Soviet era, presenting policymakers with challenges to develop practices to counter the meddling, according to the study.

"While foreign influence in U.S. domestic affairs dates back to the founding of this country, Russia has advanced its tactics into a comprehensive foreign policy tool that seeks to undermine democratic governance processes in the United States," said Marek N. Posard, the study's lead author and a sociologist at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group.

Researchers recommend that strategies for responding to foreign information efforts be broad rather than narrow, and that those strategies anticipate which subgroups of Americans are likely targets of information efforts by foreign adversaries.

Additionally, there is a need to develop evidence-based preventative interventions for those who are most likely targets within U.S. society.

The RAND study documents how foreign influence in U.S. domestic affairs dates back to the founding of this country, with both Alexander Hamilton and George Washington warning about the dangers of foreign influence in U.S. governing.

While many countries have sought to use active measures against the U.S., the Soviet Union and then Russia institutionalized them over many decades and advanced them into a comprehensive foreign policy tool. The strategy is used to undermine democratic governance processes in the United States and its allies, with the overarching aim to weaken the United States and its allies, while advancing Russia as a global power.

The techniques the Soviets developed during the Cold War have been augmented today with internet-based media, social networking sites, trolls and bots, according to the report. Technological development has opened new means of manipulation via information and facilitates more scalable, bigger and more-impactful operations with minimal expense.

RAND researchers say that some of Russia's actions aim to exacerbate divisive issues like racial inequities or immigration. Others target public confidence in democratic institutions and processes to undermine social trust.

Reports indicate that Russian-backed attempts to create discord in the U.S. have made use of existing movements across the American political ideological spectrum and worked to create new ones. Reports show that online Russian trolls have targeted both white supremacists and civil rights activists.

"Successful information efforts try to sow deep divisions between groups of people to generate a perception of 'us' versus 'them' that that will trigger strong reactions in people," Posard said. "The ultimate goal is to reduce the probability that groups of people may find common ground on issues of public concern."

Any defensive strategy should account for the complex relationship between the production of falsehoods, how others distribute content online and the impacts of the content on consumers.

RAND researchers say an antidote to manufacturing intergroup conflict is convincing people that they have more in common with those who are different from them than they may believe at first glance. The RAND report recommends collecting, analyzing and evaluating preventative interventions to protect people from reacting to falsehoods meant to divide the U.S.

The research was sponsored by the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services. The report is the first in a four-part series aimed at helping policymakers and the public understand the threat of online foreign interference in national, state and local elections, and how to mitigate it.

Communications in space demand the most sensitive receivers possible for maximum reach, while also requiring high bit-rate operations. A novel concept for laser-beam based communications, using an almost noiseless optical preamplifier in the receiver, was recently demonstrated by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

In a new paper published in the scientific journal Nature: Light Science & Applications, a team of researchers describes a free-space optical transmission system relying on an optical amplifier that, in principle, does not add any excess noise - in contrast to all other preexisting optical amplifiers, referred to as phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs).

The researchers' new concept demonstrates an unprecedented receiver sensitivity of just one photon-per-information bit at a data rate of 10 gigabits per second.

"Our results show the viability of this new approach for extending the reach and data rate in long-distance space communication links. It therefore also has the promise to help break through the present-day data-return bottleneck in deep-space missions, that space agencies around the world are suffering from today," says Professor Peter Andrekson, head of the research group and author of the article together with PhD Ravikiran Kakarla and senior researcher Jochen Schröder at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience at Chalmers University of Technology.

Substantially increasing the reach and information rate for future high-speed links will have big implications for technologies such as inter-satellite communication, deep-space missions, and earth monitoring with light detection and ranging (Lidar). Systems for such high-speed data connections are increasingly using optical laser beams rather than radio-frequency beams. A key reason for this is that the loss of power as the beam propagates is substantially smaller at light wavelengths, since the beam divergence is reduced.

Nevertheless, over long distances, light beams also experience large loss. For example, a laser beam sent from the Earth to the Moon - around 400,000 kilometres - with a 10 cm aperture size, will experience a loss of power of around 80 dB, meaning only 1 part in 100 million will remain. As the transmittable power is limited, it is of critical importance to have receivers that can recover the information sent with as low power received as possible. This sensitivity is quantified as the minimum number of photons per information bit necessary to recover the data without error.

In the new concept from Chalmers, information is encoded onto a signal wave, which along with a pump wave at different frequency generates a conjugated wave (known as an idler) in a nonlinear medium. These three waves are launched together into the free space. At the receiving point, after capturing the light in an optical fiber, the PSA amplifies the signal using a regenerated pump wave. The amplified signal is then detected in a conventional receiver.

"This approach fundamentally results in the best possible sensitivity of any pre-amplified optical receiver and also outperforms the all other current state-of-the-art receiver technologies," says Peter Andrekson.

The system uses a simple modulation format encoded with a standard error correction code and a coherent receiver with digital signal processing for signal recovery. This method is straightforwardly scalable to much higher data rates if needed. It also operates at room temperature, meaning it can be implemented in space terminals and not only on the ground.

The theoretical sensitivity limits of this approach are also discussed in the paper and compared to other existing methods, with the conclusion that the new approach is essentially the best possible for a very broad range of data rates.

Researchers at TU Graz have found a way to convert the aromatic substance vanillin into a redox-active electrolyte material for liquid batteries. The technology is an important step towards ecologically sustainable energy storage.

"It is ground-breaking in the field of sustainable energy storage technology," says Stefan Spirk from the Institute of Bioproducts and Paper Technology at Graz University of Technology. He and his team have succeeded in making redox-flow batteries more environmentally friendly by replacing their core element, the liquid electrolyte, which are mostly made up of ecologically harmful heavy metals or rare earths - with vanillin, an important ingredient of Austrian vanilla croissants.

Sustainable energy storage

Vanillin, a commonly used flavour compound, is one of the few fine-chemicals produced from lignin. Spirk and his team refine lignin into vanillin into a redox-active material using mild and green chemistry without the use of toxic and expensive metal catalysts, so that it can be used in flow batteries. The process works at room temperature and can be implemented with common household chemicals. Vanillin is also present in large quantities. "If you want you can buy it even in the supermarket, but we can also use a simple reaction to separate it from lignin, which in turn is produced in large quantities as waste product in paper production."

Patenting and commercialisation

The separation and refining process was patented and the successful test results were published in the journal "Angewandte Chemie".

Now the researchers want to commercialise the technology, especially since the process is highly scalable and suitable for continuous production. Spirk explains: "The plan is to hook up our plant to a pulp mill and isolate the vanillin from the lignin that is left over as waste. Whatever is not needed can subsequently flow back into the regular cycle and be used energetically as usual. We are in concrete talks with Mondi AG, a leading global manufacturer of paper-based products, which is showing great interest in the technology." For the final implementation, the technology has to be tested in real operation. The company is now looking for energy supply companies that can integrate the start-up's redox flow technology into its infrastructure and thus relieve the burden on the grid. Spirk is convinced of its future success because: "We can keep the value chain ranging from the procurement of raw materials and components to the generation of electricity on a regional basis, enable storage capacities of up to hundreds of MWh, relieve the strain on the electricity grid and make an important contribution to the green energy storage.

Liquid battery as a piece of the jigsaw puzzle for the energy revolution

Redox flow technology is an important piece of the puzzle for the expansion of renewable energies such as wind and solar power, as it is characterized by the storage of large amounts of energy and can therefore cushion voltage peaks in the power grid. The batteries are also suitable as backup storage for stationary applications such as power plants, hospitals, mobile phone systems or e-fuelling stations. Redox flow batteries are more easily scalable, less toxic, more recyclable and more fireproof than lithium-ion batteries. Other major advantages are their high life expectancy and low self-discharge.

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Oct. 1, 2020 -- As ventilator use in hospitals skyrockets during the COVID-19 pandemic, results of a study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), City of Hope, HonorHealth Research and Innovation Institute, and the University of Arizona suggests there may be a better way to diagnose ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP).

The findings of this study, which was supervised by Patrick Pirrotte, Ph.D., Director of TGen's Collaborative Center for Translational Mass Spectrometry, were published today in the scientific journal Molecular & Cellular Proteomics.

Intensive care unit (ICU) patients with prolonged hospitalizations, and in need of a mechanical device to help them breathe, are at high risk for developing VAP, which can increase the length and cost of hospital stays by as much as $50,000 per patient. VAP is associated with 60% of all hospital-acquired infections. VAP is also associated with more than half of ICU antibiotic use, which can lead to multi-drug resistance.

Currently, the most common way of diagnosing VAP and guiding treatment options is through the use of bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL), in which an invasive bronchoscope is passed through the mouth or nose deep into the patient's airway and lungs, with a measured amount of fluid introduced and then collected for examination.

The TGen-led research team assessed an alternative method called endotracheal aspirates (ETA), a non-invasive, faster and less costly diagnostic test in which respiratory secretions are suctioned from the lungs of patients using the already inserted intubation tube. This study represents the first detailed characterization of ETA proteins and metabolites.

"ETA has been historically overlooked in favor of BAL," said Khyati Pathak, Ph.D., a staff scientist in TGen's Collaborative Center for Translational Mass Spectrometry, and one of the study's lead authors.

Marissa McGilvrey, a research associate in Dr. Pirrotte's lab, and one of the study's lead authors, agrees: "Our study revealed that ETA is functionally diverse and highly enriched in proteins involved in immunity, suggesting that ETA is an attractive source to study lung infection."

The study involved 16 patients under mechanical ventilation in the ICU trauma center at HonorHealth Scottsdale Osborn Medical Center. Eleven of the patients acquired VAP.

"Intubation is one of the most common interventions in critical care and has been linked to increased susceptibility of lung infection and death," said Charles Hu, M.D., a Phoenix-area trauma and critical care surgeon, and an author of the study. "Intubation procedure, duration on the ventilator, length of stay and inappropriate antibiotic treatment, as well as compromised or weakened immunity, may contribute to the development of pneumonia."

ETA provides more frequent 'molecular snapshots'

One of the advantages of ETA is that it can easily be done repeatedly without invasive procedure. ETA was collected daily, starting at the first day of intubation. BAL was collected as part of current standard-of-care procedures and used for microbial cultures to aid in clinical diagnosis.

"We hypothesized that reduced invasiveness involved in ETA sampling allows easier and more frequent molecular snapshots of the patient immune response," said Frederic Zenhausern, Ph.D, M.B.A., Director of the Center for Applied NanoBioscience and Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, and one of the study authors. He also holds appointments at TGen and HonorHealth. "We anticipated that this enhanced granularity would provide valuable mechanistic insights into the causes of VAP."

Researches showed that ETA captures a rich and diverse airway proteome, enabling detection of VAP pathogen peptides and immune proteins associated with an early response to infection.

"In the majority of VAP patients, these distinctive pathogen signatures found through ETA were present up to two days earlier than the BAL culture-based diagnosis," said Dr. Pirrotte, the study's senior author. "ETA may be an attractive alternative for earlier and cost-effective clinical diagnosis of pneumonia in intubated patients."

As Australia's aged care sector continues to be scrutinised, researchers at the University of South Australia show that plain solutions are often the best, with a new study finding that aged care residents can improve their nutrition intake simply by increasing their meal sizes.

Assessing the effectiveness of environmental cues within an aged-care home - music, fragrance and other health information - researchers discovered that if residents were offered larger meals, they would eat more, thereby increasing energy and nutrition levels.

The study found that for each kilojoule increase in served energy there was a 0.73 kilojoule increase in consumed energy.

UniSA researcher Hei Tong Lau, says that the portion size effect was a manipulation to test the true effects of extrinsic food-cues.

"Our research is focussed on improving the nutrition and health status of older Australians living in a residential aged care facility," Lau says.

"In Australia, up to 70 per cent of elderly people living in aged care facilities are suffering from malnutrition, the primary reason for which is inadequate food intake.

"To improve this, we must find ways to encourage older people to eat more. And while there has been a justified focus on the food itself - including look, taste and texture ¬- we have been concentrating on other factors that can improve the food experience, within a real-world aged care facility.

"While exploring environmental factors that could improve the dining atmosphere, we found that portion size was highly correlated with the amount of food that residents consumed.

"And, that both music and fragrance could positively influence food consumption, but secondary to portion size, as we did see variances among each individual."

According to the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC) and under the Aged Care Quality Standards (effective 2019), aged care service providers in Australia are required to ensure appropriate nutrition and energy intake for all residents.

The study examined the presence of the portion size effect - the act of eating more food when served a more significant portion - in an Adelaide-based residential care facility. Over a seven-week period, the food intake of 31 residents was recorded once a week, both under a control and a cue-enhanced setting.

Lau says the findings provide valuable insights for aged care caterers and providers.

"With an ageing population and high levels of malnutrition among aged care residents, there is a clear need to better understand factors that can influence residents' food intake," Lau says.

"Increasing serving sizes may seem like a small step, but for residents who need the nutrition, it's massive move forward."

Global warming is affecting daytime and night-time temperatures differently - and greater night-time warming is more common than greater daytime warming worldwide - new research shows.

University of Exeter scientists studied warming from 1983 to 2017 and found a difference in mean annual temperature of more than 0.25°C between daytime and night-time warming in over half of the global land surface.

Days warmed more quickly in some locations, and nights did in others - but the total area of disproportionately greater night-time warming was more than twice as large.

The study shows this "warming asymmetry" has been driven primarily by changing levels of cloud cover.

Increased cloud cover cools the surface during the day and retains the warmth during the night, leading to greater night-time warming. Whereas, decreasing cloud cover allows more warmth to reach the surface during the day, but that warmth is lost at night.

"Warming asymmetry has potentially significant implications for the natural world," said lead author Dr Daniel Cox, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"We demonstrate that greater night-time warming is associated with the climate becoming wetter, and this has been shown to have important consequences for plant growth and how species, such as insects and mammals, interact.

"Conversely, we also show that greater daytime warming is associated with drier conditions, combined with greater levels of overall warming, which increases species vulnerability to heat stress and dehydration.

"Species that are only active at night or during the day will be particularly affected."

The global study examined hourly records of temperature, cloud cover, specific humidity and precipitation.

The authors modelled the different rates of change of daytime maximum and night-time minimum temperatures, and mean daytime and mean night-time cloud cover, specific humidity and precipitation.

They then looked at changes in vegetation growth and precipitation over the same period.

The study found that differences in daytime and night-time vegetation growth depended on rainfall.

Increased night-time warming led to less vegetation growth where it rained more, likely due to increased cloud cover blocking the sun. Whereas, vegetation growth was limited by water availability due to less rainfall where the days warmed more.

Genova (Italy), 30 September 2020 - The way humans interpret behavior of AI-endowed artificial agents, such as humanoid robots, depends on specific individual attitudes that can be detected from neural activity. Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) demonstrated that people's bias towards robots, that is, attributing them intentionality or considering them as "mindless things", can be correlated with distinct brain activity patterns. The research results have been published today in Science Robotics and are important for understanding the way humans can engage with robots, also considering their acceptance in healthcare applications and daily life.

The research study was carried out by IIT's lab "Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction" in Genova, coordinated by Agnieszka Wykowska, whose focus is understanding human social cognition in interaction with artificial agents, humanoid robots specifically. In addition, Wykowska's research line explores possible use of humanoids robots in the healthcare sector, by means of developing robot-assisted training protocols for individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and other disorders where social skills are compromised. In 2016 Wykowska was awarded a European Research Council (ERC)'s grant for her "InStance" project which addresses the question of when and under what conditions people treat robots as intentional beings. That is, whether, in order to explain and interpret robot's behaviour, people refer to mental states such as beliefs or desires. The paper published today in Science Robotics is a result of these investigations.

Humanoid robots are a unique category, as they resemble humans to some extent, and thus they might evoke the tendency to perceive them as intentional beings. On the other hand, people are perfectly aware that robots are artefacts, and thus, they should be treated as such. In a previous study, Wykowska and her research group observed that people differ in their likelihood of treating robots as intentional. Some individuals are more likely to attribute intentionality to robots; some are more likely to describe robots in a purely mechanistic manner. In this most recent study published in Science Robotics, researchers found that such difference in attitudes can be correlated with brain activity, measured by electroencephalogram (EEG), so that it is possible to predict people's bias in attributing intentionality towards robots, such as the IIT's iCub (https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-12/iidt-tio121817.php).

"Our findings are fascinating, as they show that it is possible to bridge a gap between a high-level philosophical concept and neuroscience data, namely, that attitudes towards technology can be linked to distinct brain activity patterns", Agnieszka Wykowska comments. "This study shows that people might have various attitudes, such anthropomorphizing robots to various extent, and those attitudes can actually be detected at the neural level".

Researchers tested 52 individuals with EEG. First, they recorded people's neural activity at rest, when participants were asked just to relax and let their mind wander freely. Subsequently, participants were involved in a task, where they needed to choose descriptions of various (visually presented) scenarios involving the iCub robot. The descriptions used "intentional/mentalistic" vocabulary (such as "iCub wants to draw something") or "mechanistic" vocabulary (such as "iCub optimizes grip for small objects").

Researchers found that even when the brain is not engaged in a particular experimental task, that is, at rest, there is a certain pattern of neural activity (in the beta frequency range of the EEG signal) that predicts people's bias in attributing intentionality toward the iCub humanoid robot. They also found differences in brain activity at the moment that participants interpreted specific iCub behaviours as having either a mechanistic or intentional explanation.

Apart from contributing to basic research, these results are important for understanding engagement with robots and can be predictive for the future acceptance of robots in healthcare applications and daily life.

Immune checkpoint blockade therapy (ICT) has shown potential in the treatment of multiple tumors, but the poor response rate has restricted its further application.

Although scientists have developed some combination treatments to enhance the efficacy of ICT, satisfactory tumor inhibition in a variety of tumor models has not been achieved.

Recently, however, a research team led by Prof. TIAN Huayu from the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry (CIAC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed an innovative immune cocktail therapy that combined ICT along with other therapeutic approaches. The cocktail therapy achieved multiple boosting of the cancer-immunity cycle by utilizing a nano-delivery system. The study was published in Science Advances on Sept. 30.

The proposed cocktail therapy achieved anti-tumor treatment by combining immunogenic chemotherapy, immune checkpoint blockade, and extracellular matrix elimination. It consists of two kinds of tumor microenvironment (TME) responsive drug and gene delivery nanoparticles. The smart nano delivery systems can achieve specific delivery of doxorubicin and co-delivery of plasmids expressed small hairpin RNA of PD-L1 and hyaluronidase in the tumor area, leading to improved therapeutic effects.

The cocktail therapy can also facilitate T cell priming by inducing tumor immunogenic cell death and polarizing an immunosuppressive TME to an immune-active phenotype.

Benefiting from these advantages, outstanding immunotherapeutic effects were achieved in multiple tumor types. For example, the cocktail therapy induced dramatic tumor shrinkage in B16F10, CT26 and 4T1 tumor models, making it more efficient than a traditional combination of chemotherapy and ICT.

"These excellent outcomes are mainly attributed to the increasing amount of peripheral CD8+ T cell infiltration in tumors, which can also induce strong immune memory effects and effectively prevent tumor metastasis," said Prof. TIAN.

This work presents a promising comprehensive immunotherapy strategy that integrates multiple aspects of regulating the cancer-immunity cycle, such as tumor antigen release, T cell trafficking from the periphery to the tumor, effective killing of tumor cells, and the generation of immune memory T cells.

The cocktail therapy strategy provides a new technique for combining treatment approaches synergistic with ICT. It is a way to develop more efficient antitumor immunotherapy in the clinic.

The 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence has revealed areas of the Los Angeles basin where the amplification of shaking of high-rise buildings is greatest, according to a new report in Seismological Research Letters.

The 6 July 2019 magnitude 7.1 earthquake, located 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Los Angeles, did not cause structural damage in the city. But there was significant shaking in some high-rise buildings in downtown Los Angeles--so much that their residents reported feeling nauseous from the movement.

All buildings have a natural "vibration" or sway, which civil engineers and seismologists refer to as the building's longest natural period since it marks the amount of time it takes for a building to move back and forth in one cycle in a plane parallel to the ground. High-rise buildings of 15 floors or more, long-span bridges and large diameter fuel storage tanks, among other structures, typically have natural periods of three seconds or more.

Using data from a network of seismic stations across the L.A. basin, Monica Kohler of Caltech and her colleagues determined that long-period buildings experienced the most amplification of shaking from the Ridgecrest earthquake.

But the effect was not the same throughout the basin. At six- and eight-second periods, the maximum amplification occurred in the western part of the L.A. basin and the south-central San Fernando Valley.

In the event of a future earthquake similar to Ridgecrest, a high-rise building in those areas could experience shaking four times larger than a building located in downtown Los Angeles, the researchers concluded. In a 52-story building, this means that the upper floors might sway back and forth as much as one meter (about 3 feet)--or as much as two meters in a magnitude 7.6 earthquake, straining the building's structural integrity.

When seismic waves enter the softer sediments that fill in a basin, they slow down and their energy "piles up," creating larger amplitude waves that lead to stronger shaking. Researchers around the world have found that in general, the deepest parts of the basin--those with the most sediment overlying bedrock--experience the most amplification.

However, Kohler and colleagues found only a partial correlation between basin depth and amplification in their study.

"There's always been this assumption that the deeper the sediments or the thicker the basin ... the more amplification you're going to see, and we thought we were going to see that with our results," Kohler said. "But the sites with the largest amplifications for these long periods of more than three seconds are not close to the deepest portion of the basin."

"That's of concern because the next generation building code is being developed so that it incorporates parameters that account for deep basin effects," she added, "and if you get the location of the amplification effects wrong, you're going to have an application of the building code that's not right for specific locations."

The scientists were able to see a pattern of site amplification after the Ridgecrest earthquake with the help of a network of more than 500 seismic stations across the region, including 360 stations belonging to the Community Seismic Network (CSN). The CSN consists of low-cost accelerometers placed throughout the Los Angeles area, most notably in Los Angeles Unified School District buildings. Data from the network can be processed at the sensor site or in the cloud, and Kohler calls it "a really great example of a citizen science project that has worked for a decade."

"The denser the seismic network you have, the better resolution, the better you can see small-spatial-scale variations in ground shaking," Kohler explained

She compared the results to suddenly being able to pick individual stars' features out of a cosmic blur with a better telescope. "We're seeing a level of detail that is much greater than has been seen before."

It's likely that several phenomena contribute to variations in shaking amplification around the basin, Kohler noted. She and her colleagues are especially intrigued by one possibility: that shallow buried sediment deposits associated with historic waterways and oil and gas development might play a role.

"We're actively looking into whether there's a spatial correlation between where these ancient and current water systems associated with the L.A. river could be having an effect," Kohler said, "whether there's a relationship between where the water systems exist and used to exist, and the kind of amplification you see in ground motion."

ITHACA, N.Y. - Metals such as iron and calcium play a crucial role inside the human body, so it's no surprise that bioengineers would like to integrate them into the soft, stretchy materials used to repair skin, blood vessels, lungs and other tissue.

Designing elastomers - a type of polymer with rubber-like properties - is a laborious process that yields a product with limited versatility. But Cornell engineers have developed a new framework that makes elastomer design a modular process, allowing for the mixing and matching of different metals with a single polymer.

The framework is detailed in "Chelation Crosslinking of Biodegradable Elastomers," published Sept. 22 in Advanced Materials.

The framework was conceived when researchers from Cornell's Biofoundry Lab sought to create an elastic vascular graft that could help repair heart tissue using copper. Yadong Wang, the McAdam Family Foundation Professor of Cardiac Assist Technology in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, and postdoctoral associate Ying Chen wanted to incorporate copper into their graft because of its role in inducing angiogenesis - the process by which new blood vessels grow from existing ones.

Mixing copper and other metal ions with polymers has remained a niche area of chemistry, so there was no blueprint for Chen to follow. Instead, she set out to engineer a biocompatible and biodegradable elastomer from scratch.

Chen's key breakthrough was crosslinking her polymer with copper ions using chelating ligands - molecules that tightly bind a metal ion using two or more bonds, "like how a crab claw pinches an object," said Wang. While chelation bonds are considered to be of moderate strength in chemistry, elastomers have many crosslinking molecules, so a multitude of chelating ligands can work together to form a strong molecule.

And because one ligand can bind multiple metal ions, it can yield a wide range of mechanical properties - such as stiffness and toughness - as well as biomedical properties. For example, a polymer's copper ions could be replaced with zinc, or a combination of copper and zinc could be used - a tandem that is present in an important enzyme for fighting human aging.

"The discovery was pretty exciting," Chen said. "I just wanted to move on with my copper elastomer because I'm focused on tissue engineering, but Professor Wang was saying, 'Slow down, we need to test how powerful this platform is and what we can do with it.'"

As proof of concept, Chen engineered six unique elastomers using one polymer and six different metals, and then made a seventh elastomer using a calcium-magnesium mix. It was the first time anyone had demonstrated a biodegradable metal-ion elastomer - let alone seven of them.

"When Ying showed me what she had done, I said, 'This material is amazing,'" Wang said. "There's so much you can do with just this one simple design. Using many different types of metal ions, one polymer can turn into eight, nine, 10 different elastomers."

The research team also performed mechanical and biocompatibility experiments on their elastomers, testing for the materials' stress, strain and ability to be used with living tissue. The durability and biocompatibility of the elastomers matched that of more traditional biomaterials used in medicine.

"The copper material was very elastic," Chen said. "It can be stretched at least hundreds of times without rupturing."

Now that the platform has published, Chen is focusing her research on the copper elastomer graft and its ability to repair blood vessels and heart tissue. In the meantime, she hopes other engineers will use her platform to create new materials for improving soft tissue reconstruction and regeneration.

Wang shares the same hope, and said possible applications for the framework are not limited to blood vessels and other tissues, but could potentially be used for industrial elastomers such as eco-friendly tires that biodegrade.

"We are just scratching the surface," he said.

Protecting crops against pests and diseases is essential to ensure a secure food supply. Around 95 percent of food comes from conventional agriculture, which uses chemical pesticides to keep crops healthy. Increasingly, however, organic pesticides are also being sought as an alternative. Some organic pesticides contain live spores of the fungus Trichoderma, which have the ability to suppress other pathogens. Researchers at the University of Göttingen have now discovered that one Trichoderma species can cause severe rot in cobs of maize (corn). The results were published in the journal Frontiers in Agronomy.

The massive outbreak of a previously unknown species of Trichoderma on corn cobs in Europe was first detected in Southern Germany in 2018. In affected plants, grey-green spore layers formed on the grains of corn and between the leaves that form the husks of the cobs. In addition, the infested grains germinated prematurely. For this study, the scientists brought maize plants in the greenhouse into contact with Trichoderma by inoculation. They were then able to prove that the dry matter content of the maize cobs is greatly reduced. Annette Pfordt, PhD student at the Department of Crop Sciences of the University of Göttingen and first author of the study, analysed 18 separate Trichoderma strains mainly from maize cobs in Southern Germany and France over two years. She found that some of these strains are highly aggressive with a cob infestation of 95 to 100 percent. By means of molecular genetic analyses, these spores could be assigned to the relatively new species Trichoderma afroharzianum. Within this species of fungus, previously unknown plant-pathogenic strains seem to have evolved which are now responsible for this newly discovered disease affecting maize.

"The species used in organic plant protection products is a close relative, namely Trichoderma harzianum. Strains of this species were not as aggressive in the study, but in the inoculation experiments they also led to a slight infestation on the cob," says Pfordt. "Although the investigations carried out so far show that the Trichoderma strains used in organic plant protection products differ from the aggressive forms now found, it is also clear that the risks from the use of living microorganisms in plant protection must be thoroughly investigated," adds Professor Andreas von Tiedemann, head of the Department of Plant Pathology and Protection at the University of Göttingen.

In vegetable growing, "Trichoderma agents" can be used, for example to control diseases such as Botrytis (grey mould) or Fusarium and to reduce rotting pathogens on the crop products. Various organic products containing Trichoderma are available on the market. They are used almost exclusively in organic farming. Trichoderma species belong to the ascomycetes and are found worldwide in the soil, on plant roots, in decaying plant remains and on wood. They act as decomposers of substrates and as antagonists of other microorganisms. This is the first time that they have been described as pathogens on plants.

Cocoa is in great demand on the world market, but there are many different ways to increase production. A research team from the University of Göttingen has now investigated the relative importance of the use of pesticides, fertilisers and manual pollination in a well replicated field trial in Indonesian agroforestry systems. The result: an increase in both cocoa yield and farming income was achieved - not by agrochemicals, but by manual pollination. The study was published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment.

Cocoa requires cross-pollination by insects to produce fruit. It is unclear how to encourage natural pollination by tiny midges, flies or wasps: in fact, the true identity of the main pollinators has yet to be discovered. Under natural conditions, more than 90 percent of flowers are not visited by insects and do not develop fruit. These results clearly show that traditional agricultural intensification with agrochemicals is not always the best way forward.

Working together with colleagues and students of the Indonesian University of Tadulako of Palu, the scientists found that hand pollination increased the yield of cocoa trees by 161 percent. After deducting the costs of manual pollination, this meant a 69 percent increase in income for small-holder farmers. Using more pesticide and fertiliser did not increase yields.

"Our results show how agroecological intensification can be successful by promoting biological processes or using innovative techniques such as manual pollination," explains first author Manuel Toledo-Hernández, PhD student in the Department of Agroecology at the University of Göttingen. The work was supervised by Professor Teja Tscharntke, Head of Agroecology, and Professor Thomas C. Wanger, now at Westlake University in China. They add: "Lower harvests due to insufficient pollination have a major effect on many crops in the tropics as well as in temperate latitudes. This should be taken into account much more in future efforts to increase production."